Stories for "Helen Fisher"

By Kate Torgovnick, Morton Bast, Thu-Huong Ha The future. When it comes down to it, it’s not about flying cars, flashy robots, jetpacks, or awesome sunglasses. It’s about the little things we can do to advance healthcare, better education, create opportunities, improve connections between each other, and make lives just a little bit easier. In […]

Love isn’t so much an emotion, says Helen Fisher in her TED Talk. No, love is a brain system — one of three that that’s related to mating and reproduction. It’s those other two systems that explain why human beings are capable of infidelity even as we so highly value love. We see infidelity on […]

Today is National Poetry Day in the UK, and why not everywhere? We found out about it in the stateless world of Twitter trending topics. If you’re in the mood to celebrate, watch a few of these TEDTalks about, or featuring, poetry: “War child” Emmanuel Jal tells the story of his amazing life in words […]

To celebrate March 8, International Women’s Day, we suggest these four TEDTalks gems from some amazing speakers — artists, scientists and economists who think deeply about the role of women. Author and activist Isabel Allende discusses women, creativity, feminism — and the power of passionate thinkers and doers: The former Finance Minister of Nigeria, Ngozi […]

In today’s beta issue of Tina Brown’s new web newspaper, the Daily Beast, is this surprising and well-reported essay by Adam Hanft: “Did Anti-Depressants Cause the Mortgage Crisis?” He writes: What exactly would turn psychotropic drugs like Prozac and Paxil and Zoloft into a subplot in the subprime mess? It’s the biochemistry. Those drugs are […]

Why do we crave love so much, even to the point that we would die for the lack of it? To learn more about our very real, very physical need for romantic love, Helen Fisher and her research team took MRIs of people in love — and people who had just been dumped. As Fisher […]

Photos: Andrew Heavens “Imagine Martin Luther King saying, ‘I have a dream … But I don’t know if the others will buy it.’” – Boston Philharmonic conductor Ben Zander, on the importance of persuasive leadership “Human progress depends on unreasonable people. Reasonable people accept the world as they meet it; unreasonable people persist in trying […]

(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session ten.) Anthropologist Helen Fisher studies romantic love — its evolution, its biochemical foundations, and its importance to human society. She gave a talk at TED2006 (watch the video). Her current research is on why we fall in love and how.In the jungle of Guatemala, […]

Helen Fisher is an anthropologist with Rutgers University, specializing in gender differences and the evolution of human emotions. Her most recent book is Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. In this wide-ranging talk, she outlines the bio-chemical foundations of love (and lust), and discusses the natural talents of women, and their […]